Watched Marebito last night on jjjusten's recommendation. It's a low-budget Japanese horror film by Takashi Shimizu, director of both the Japanese and American vesions of Ju-On/The Grudge, and starring Shin'ya Tsukamoto, director of Tetsuo, the Iron Man and its sequels. Pretty great! I don't know that it's a masterpiece, but it reminded me a lot of Kiyoshi Kurosawa films like Cure and Pulse, spliced together with Tsukamoto's punk experimentalism, Shimizu's finely-honed creepiness, and lots of nods to Lovecraftian pulp horror. Dreamlike, strange and quite unpredictable.

xxp - The international title, A Stranger from Afar, gives a pretty good idea of the film's themes and tone, plus sounds very much like something Lovecraft or one of his contemporaries might have written.

Another film I really want to go to bat for here is Dementia, aka Daughter of Horror. One of the most remarkable films I've ever seen, an hour-long, dialogue-free, first-person Freudian head trip from 1955 that follows a frightened and disturbed young woman down a rabbit hole of her own making. It's similar in many ways to Polanski's Repulsion, dealing as it does with sexual psychosis, and also to the films of David Lynch, especially Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire. It's hard to believe, in fact, that Lynch and Polanski didn't crib heavily from it. The soundtrack is gorgeous, and the stylized, deliberately artificial imagery recalls German expressionist filmmakers like Weine and Murnau. It's scary, brave, campy, arguably feminist and deliriously surreal. Hard to believe that it was made five years before Hitchcock's Psycho. Would make my top 10 list even if this poll wasn't limited to horror films.

one of the charms of marebito is that shimizu shot it in 8 days and basically was using it as a palate cleanser between ju-on and the usa grudge, which obv doesnt add merit to the film inherently but does make the result kind of amazing. it def doesnt feel like a speed run film at all.

Re Watcher in the Woods, it was an earlyish scary movie for me, too -- I guess I was 10 or so. Remember it being spooky but not much else about it. The movie that did scare the living hell out of me at that age (or maybe a year earlier?) was the Body Snatchers remake, which is definitely going on my ballot. I think I literally didn't sleep for a few nights afterward. (Actually, the original Body Snatchers might make the ballot, too.)

one of the charms of marebito is that shimizu shot it in 8 days and basically was using it as a palate cleanser between ju-on and the usa grudge, which obv doesnt add merit to the film inherently but does make the result kind of amazing. it def doesnt feel like a speed run film at all.

It does and doesn't, imo. I'm not surprised that it was shot in a hurry, but it never feels rushed or thrown together. It often has a distinctly improvisational feel, like I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Shimizu just told Tsuakamoto to react silently to situations and characters about which he knew little in advance. I love how fragmentary and loosely connected it all is, though nothing feels unfinished or unanswered in the end.

I don't know, I think the stills should either be representative or intriguing images, and I imagine there'll be a fair few placers that would need bloody corpses/exploding heads to fulfil the 'representative requirement'.

Hey, for anyone curious about Dementia but unable to a hold of a proper copy (it's available through Netflix), it can be viewed in criminally low quality on YouTube. Not recommended, but might do in a pinch:

•A 163 minute version is now available on Region 1 DVD as a part of the Criterion Collection. The (Region 2) Masters of Cinema DVD is the first video release to contain the full 183 minutes of the original Japanese cut of the film.

•Originally a four-episode anthology released in Japan at 183 minutes. The USA version removes the second episode, starring Keiko Kishi and Tatsuya Nakadai, in order to shorten the running time to 125 minutes.

So really, at the time the CC was released I guess they couldn't get their hands on the original material. It was enough that they restored the fourth episode that had been completely excised from the US release.

Have been thinking about the relationship of "ghost story" to "horror" ever since I first saw The Devil's Backbone (which I will be seriously voting for, btw). It's in many respects a straight drama, and the ghost is more a figure of sympathetic pity than fear, but I nonetheless consider it one of the best horror movies of the last decade or so. The combination of supernatural elements, gothic atmosphere, creepy suspense and occasional jolts of real terror are enough to convince me that it belongs on my ballot.

The ghost story is one of the most basic and essential "scary story" models, and tbh, I'm inclined to consider almost any at least moderately creepy movie featuring ghosts part of the horror genre.

Speaking of things that are on youtube in fairly poor quality, I would like to rep once more for The Signalman. It's a 40-minute film, so possibly bearable in this format, but I haven't watched it through myself. Almost certainly my favourite Ghost Story for Christmas.